Five and a half months ago...

At his work Christmas party, David overheard his manager, Frank, mention to someone about needing to send a few people to the UK to do some business development in M&E (Media and Entertainment). He came home and told me/asked me if I would be interested, and I immediately shot him down.

"Are you kidding? We have two kids now and all of our friends and family are so close; how could we possibly move to another country right now???"

Scan forward less than six months, and I am typing this blog (which will be the first of many to come!) in a strange living room, in a strange house, on a strange street, IN OXFORD, ENGLAND!!!!

Who would've thought that we could make this decision and actually execute the move so quickly? Definitely not me! But here we are, eight hours and more than 5,500 miles away from home.

Most of you who will read this post know the details of the last six months, but I'll recap a bit. After I told Dave no, I couldn't stop thinking about possibly moving to England. Could I do it? The kids aren't in school yet, so why not? My change of heart originally came from a different point of mind than you would imagine: it wasn't that I really wanted to go, but I didn't want to regret passing up this opportunity in twenty years. Does that make sense? I could imagine Dave and I sitting on the couch after the kids are out of the house, waiting for retirement, talking about what could have been back in 2011 had we decided to go for it.

So we did. While we were in PA for Christmas, David updated his resume and sent it to Frank. Just a week or so later, Frank called and said he had two questions for David. "How serious are you about making this move? And how soon could you do it?"

It turns out that the business development project didn't really have a start date, it would just be sometime later this year or next. However, Frank said that there was a project in Oxford starting next month. WHAT? Next MONTH? No way. How could we possibly??? We talked it over and decided that if we really wanted to do this we would have to do whatever it takes, because signing up for the Oxford project would put us here for whenever the next project started. Dave feared if we turned that down, Frank may think he wasn't really as interested in relocating as he had said. So we said YES. SIGN US UP!!

We listed the condo, got a storage unit, and started making plans! Since the start date for David in the UK was still up in the air, I had to just make a decision: when would the kids and I be able to wrap up everything in CA and go to Oxford to join him? We decided we would stay until the end of April, because I couldn't imagine being apart from him any more than that!

Luckily, in the IT Consulting world, start dates don't always go as planned. There are contracts to write, teams to assemble and be approved, legal documents to review and sign...so we bought a little time. David traveled to New Jersey the week of February 14th to meet the client and team. The rest of the month he finished up all of his work at Warner Bros. and transitioned everything to someone else.

In March, David spent several weeks working M-F out of the New Jersey office, while the kids and I were in CA, sorting, packing, organizing, cleaning, etc. The condo was on the market, and it was really tough to keep everything clean and perfect for showings.

I started to think...how in the world am I going to do this?